Marc Parry posted a new story on the Chronicle of Higher Ed on Open Teaching. It’s great for the topic to get mainstream attention and I[‘m looking forward to reading the comments on the site. Alec Couros, George Siemens, David Wiley, and Wendy Drexel have contributed their thoughts to the piece and Mark has represented the topic thoghtfully. Interesting side note: The article was originally behind a paid wall, but it has now been made freely available. Enjoy!

I was very excited today to watch a video posted at Teachers College Record where Anthony Brown (a colleague in Curriculum & Instruction) discusses his research on how African American males have been constructed in the social science and educational literature. What a great way to summarize and present one’s work! I am embedding the video below, but keep on reading for more social/digital research goodness.

I’ve mentioned before that I think that educational research needs to be more social that it currently is. Why? Because I think that we can improve education by talking more to each other (and debating more with each other). TCR provided another example of this: Miseducating teachers about the poor is a critique of Ruby Payne’s framework written by Randy Bomer et al. (Randy is another colleague at UT). One can go through the TCR archives to see comments on the article, responses, and so on. Plus, there’s a couple of videos on the topic, which I am also embedding below.

Another critique:

And a response:

The point is that new technologies and cultural trends are exerting pressure on scholarship to change. The field has a lot to gain from scholarship becoming more conversational, transparent, social, and open. But, there are also pitfalls and complexities (e.g., TCR has the resources to create the professional videos included above while other publishing outlets might depend on individual scholars to contribute videos, which means that scholars’ technical abilities might limit their digital scholarship contributions). How’s that for a Saturday morning update? <smile>

P.S. Open access and TCR aren’t the best of friends however, so if you are not at a subscribing institution you may be out of luck there (though some of this content is publicly available for a while).

I am very excited to be teaching our introductory course this semester, entitled Instructional Systems Design. It’s a challenging course because it is introductory, but also because there’s so much I want to cover! Even though the syllabus is a reflection of what I think is important for someone entering the field, I want to highlight the main objective, which is to introduce students to the practice of instructional design and to enable them to become better learning experience designers.The syllabus is embedded below, but feel free to download it from scribd as well. If you’ve taught or taken a similar class in the past, I would love to hear your feedback!

an interview with Mark Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education on social and participatory online learning

and writing a paper with Royce Kimmons, one of our PhD students (information on this coming shortly…)

I am however looking forward to the Fall semester (which starts on Wednesday). Our new students have arrived and I am teaching the introduction to instructional design class that they are taking – I’m very excited about that class and look forward to working with brilliant minds to pursue learning innovations! The fall semester promises to be a busy one though as I am presenting at 2 conferences, giving keynotes at 2 other ones, and launching an adventure learning project in the Sociology department…. while working on a couple research papers.

How’s that for a 4-month summary update?! More detailed posts will follow, but, for now, you can’t complain that I haven’t kept you updated :).